Sakamoto Ryuichi

Date of Birth

17 January 1952

Place of Birth

Tokyo

Sakamoto Ryuichi is a Japanese musician with a worldwide reputation. He was taught composing by Taminosuke Matsumoto from his age of ten. When he was a student of Shinjuku High School, he experienced the student movement of those days. Then he entered Tokyo Art University. After that, he was engaged in music as a studio musician at first. In 1978, he organized a group whose name was "Yellow Magic Orchestra" with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, or "YMO" for short. It played the leading role in technopop and influenced a light music scene of Japan. "YMO" was disbanded in 1983 though they had won enthusiastic popularity.

Since then, Sakamoto Ryuichi has kept playing an active part in every type of mass media, for example music, movies, publications and advertisements. He mainly plays and composes and also produces albums of other musicians as a producer. On the other hand, he appeared in the movies "Senjyo-no Merry Christmas" and "The Last Emperor" and he was estimated highly as a movie actor. He was in charge of music of these movies and many awards went to him.

He received "The Mainichi Movie Contest Music Award" for "Senjyo-no Merry Christmas" and honorable awards in "The Last Emperor". His music of "The Last Emperor" was admired and became his most important work. "The England Academy Music Award," "Golden Glove Composition Award," "Academy Composition Award," "Grammy Music Album Award" and other two awards went to him.

In 1992, he composed the song which was used at the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics. Sakamoto Ryuichi has a great talent and he can compose in the room where even unrelated music is playing. However he appeared on the variety TV program sometimes and show us friendly aspect of his character. His wife Akiko Yano is also a singer and musician.

In 1994, he produced "Geisha-girls".

In 1997, His work "The other side of love" made a big hit.

In 2001, his work "ZERO LANDMINE" for landmine issue.
The money from the CD is used to eliminate landmines at all over the world.

A lot of Japanese artists and world artists took part in this project.